The Hardest Part of a Thru-Hike: the Midpoint

Outside’s Trail Magic hiking columnist Grayson Haver Currin is attempting to bag the triple crown of hiking. He’s already thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, with one more to go: the Continental Divide Trail. He’ll share notes from the field as he walks with his wife for the rest of the year. Here’s his second file, just after they finished hiking through Glacier National Park. Tune in on Outside’s Instagram to follow his journey.

Early on a gray Monday morning in mid-September, I heard groans echo down the hallway of the hostel where I was staying, like water rumbling through old radiators at the onset of another winter.

The thru-hiker grievances I heard were manifold, loud, and ordinary enough—the sort of stuff we vent about most days. Cold rain was due to arrive this morning and perhaps not relent until week’s end, making Colorado’s high peaks not only miserable but perhaps also dangerous. Every digital map app had fundamental flaws. The groceries in this town were too expensive, twice as much as the last stop. Equipment was breaking, legs were sore, and the outlook—just beyond halfway on the Continental Divide Trail’s southbound corridor from Canada to Mexico—was grim. Would this awesome, exhausting, and totally arduous trail ever end, or were we all secretly Sisyphus, forever bound to his tiresome boulder in Tartarus?

There is no harder portion of a long thru-hike than its middle, when it seems you have hiked an impossibly long distance and somehow still have an impossibly long distance to go. Any point of physical weakness has, by this point, been exploited and exacerbated by millions of footfalls, hundreds of trips, dozens of spills. The great debates of your brain have raged, quelled, and returned with more might than is comfortable. You have experienced loneliness, community, wonder, boredom, misery, elation, heat, cold, exhaustion, and the over-caffeinated rush of mainlined Folgers. Reaching the halfway point feels a little like climbing an enjoyable, gentle mountain, getting to the top, and then finding that the backside is impossibly steep and your only way down. Can you endure enough to reach the end?

On that Monday morning in Grand Lake—a tiny town on the western boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park—I could relate. Tina, my wife, and I had hiked across Montana and Wyoming, plus a sliver of Idaho, sometimes churning out as many 40 miles in a day. But the formidable peaks of Colorado and their volatile weather now lay between us and a final sprint across New Mexico—the mountains a moat in reverse.

Our own problems were mounting: The zipper on Tina’s prized rain jacket had snapped, forcing her to fasten it with Velcro. The zipper on our tent was sticking nightly, too. A bad shin splint was forcing Tina into sustained intimacy with Ibuprofen, and, soon after her water filter malfunctioned, she wondered if she might have giardia. My nose, meanwhile, had been bleeding for three weeks, my lip for one. A deep fissure in the skin of my heel made each step feel like I had landed on a thumbtack, and a head cold that I could not quit kept clawing at my energy stores. I had ruined at least ten pairs of toe socks by that point. (Why can’t Injinji be more like the indestructible Darn Tough, by the way?) And I was very tired of tuna stuffed into tortillas, though I knew this would constitute my lunchtime routine for at least five more weeks.

But this important moment, to me, is the crucial essence of thru-hiking—the difficulty that separates it from nearly every other activity. You pore over the stresses and difficulties of pressing on, especially when those challenges and the trail itself seem infinite.

Thru-hiking is perhaps the easiest hard sport. It is little more than advanced walking, after all, with some rock scrambling and river fording thrown in for variety’s sake. Its endless difficulty, though, is waking up each morning and choosing not to give up, because you’re tired or sore, or because it’s raining or frigid outside. People often extol the life-changing power of thru-hikes, how they can transform your outlook on comfort, friendship, existence. The root of this personal growth is not athletic endurance, but instead the mental, emotional, and even spiritual perseverance that the day-to-day routine hardens and sharpens, like the blade of some mythic sword. Thru-hikes are exercises of cold-blooded attrition, which explains why less than a third of folks who start the Appalachian Trail finish even now, despite all the ultralight gear and vlog tutorials now at our disposal.

At this point, I’m nearly 10,000 miles into my life as a thru-hiker, and most mornings, I actively decide to continue, or at least not to stop. This is never so difficult as it feels as I write this column—stuck in the middle section of my trek with the rest of the year’s southbound CDT hikers all grumbling and doubting for our own special reasons.

Back to that Monday morning in Grand Lake. Tina and I eavesdropped on the complaints and wondered about them ourselves. Did it make sense to take an unplanned day off to see what the weather did? Did it make sense to take an unplanned day off, because of her shin and my foot and our general brain drain?

But around noon, after each eating two bagels and trying but failing to repair her rain jacket, we headed south again. We cut between Grand and Shadow Mountain lakes on a pleasant little paved road, splitting them before crossing into Rocky Mountain National Park and slowly ascending several thousand feet as the rain fitfully spat. That first night, camped near a trailhead parking lot, we wondered if we were the only ones who had left town.

But the next morning, which dawned all bright and beautiful despite the clouds amassing in the distance, we met two other couples who had raced out of Grand Lake, too. Together, the six of us decided to take advantage of the mostly clear skies and our strong pace by turning off the CDT at the 13,309-foot summit of James Peak and traversing across three other mountains before rejoining the trail itself, high atop Mt. Flora.

Up and down the ridge we went, high-fiving and beaming at the end of each climb as we sheltered ourselves from the wind. With the so-called Pfiffner Traverse, we’d added a few thousand feet of elevation loss and gain to our overall journey, but we also regained a sense of why we were out there—to have a series of stunning adventures with friends old and new, no matter how much our quads groaned or how wholly holey our socks were. We finished in the dark, all deliriously content in that way only abject fatigue brings.

Dawn, though, could not come slowly enough. I pulled myself from my sleeping pad the way you might scrape burnt butter from a cast-iron skillet, the drool of a truly deep sleep stuck to both sides of my face. I never wanted to leave my sleeping bag again. Still, I made my coffee, packed my bag, and crossed Highway 40, immediately ascending the first of the day’s three peaks through an almost impenetrable brain fog.

As we descended the day’s last summit ten hours later, it began snowing for the first time on this hike. A thousand feet lower, the snow became rain, made almost muggy by sunlight that occasionally laced through the clouds, furtive as a burglar. As I sweat inside the fancy rain jacket I wore to keep me dry, I could only laugh—and continue walking south, toward Mexico, away from these Middle Blues. That’s the only way to do it, of course, to keep going even when you just want to sit down and grouse or lay down and sleep.